Pridger's Blog - Pridger vs. The New World Order

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Friday, 30 May, 2008

SPEAKING OF SEXUAL AND LEGAL ABERRATIONS...

Hurray for the Texas Supreme Court! They did the right thing and, hopefully, have righted a ghastly injustice of monumental proportions. The YFZ Ranch families will be soon be reunited. So maybe there is some hope for the Republic yet. But...

Sodomy and Homosexuality are going main line, and same sex marriages are becoming legally sanctioned (thus encouraged), by some states. On the other hand, the hint of marriage of 14 and 15 year old girls elicit legal outrage and charges of rape and child abuse. Warren Jeffs, the "spiritual leader" and "saint," of the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter-Day Saints, languishes in prison for his conviction for arranging such marriages. He's now doing long consecutive prison terms as an "accomplice to rape" – a particularly despicable sounding crime.

When we think of "child abuse" we think of bruised and battered, or psychologically scared, children. When we think of "rape" we think of a violent crime against a woman. Funny that Pridger also happens to think of Bill Clinton – former president and husband of a current presidential candidate. President Clinton was never charged or prosecuted, of course, but there were plenty of credible accusations and allegations, along with other "bimbo eruptions." Maybe Clinton is totally innocent on all counts – but he never came close to being charged and tried for a crime (other than lying under oath, which is forgivable when it come to politicians).

A single call from an unidentified, and still allusive, complainant was sufficient excuse for the Texas "authorities" to invade a church community and kidnap 555 women and children. They placed over 400 children and young ladies in foster care to protect them from "possible" past, present, and "future" abuse.

Speaking of "alleged" child sexual abuse. Michael Jackson isn't doing hard time. But he, of course, was different.

Of course, "forced" marriage, whether the lady is fourteen, twenty-four, or sixty-four, is despicable and unacceptable. But there is apparently no actual evidence of forced marriages taking place at YFZ ranch.

Unfortunately "laws" are inflexible. They make no allowances for "religious beliefs" or extenuating circumstances – and Texas law says that 16 year old girls are children just like six year olds. Under such laws, sex with a 16 year old consensual "wife" is exactly the same as the violent rape of a three year old lost orphan.

Not that Pridger is all that much of an apologist for Jeffs' rather bizarre sect, but the marriage of 14 and 15 year old women is a lot more "natural" and "traditional" than "same sex" marriage at any age. Yet, as a society, we are increasingly going out of our way to sanction (and thus encourage), sodomy and traditionally taboo sex acts – we even put the whole array of them on the big screen as public entertainment under the protection of the First Amendment and "freedom of speech."

This is bizarre too – though we have come to take it for granted. Professionally produced pornography, and obscene speech, have almost come to define American culture.

Yet, it wasn't all that long ago that most states allowed marriage of any "grown" girl, with the consent of her parents. Such marriages were rather common – and there is certainly no religious prohibition of young marriages.

There was nothing particularly unusual about a young lady getting married early until relatively recent times. It was better for a young lady to marry early than wait too long and perhaps "go wrong" – there was no higher calling for a woman than becoming a wife, mother, and homemaker.

For example, Pridger's grandmother was married at the tender age of 13. Of course, Pridger's great grandparents probably were not at all happy about such an early marriage – 13 was considered a little young even in 1903. But it was better to have a wedding at home than risk an elopement. Fortunately, at least we can rest assured that it was not a shotgun wedding. Their first child did not come until the fourth year of the marriage.

Pridger's grandfather was 21 years old when he married his 13 year old bride – and they had children, happiness, sadness, and responsibilities – and both lived long and productive lives.

Such a marriage today, however, would make Pridger's grandfather a child abusing rapist – and probably his great grandparents "accomplices to rape." Grandma, who obviously considered herself a grown woman, would be considered an abused child. She would be taken away by the Department of Child Protective Services and placed in foster care.

Grandpa, of course, would be sent to prison for maybe ten or twenty years or more. Pridger's great grandparents might also be prosecuted and put away for a matter of years as accomplices of the crime. History would have been changed, and Pridger probably wouldn't be here.

Grandma would have been raised up to age eighteen or so in a series of government subsidized foster homes, and released into the cold cruel world at age eighteen. With her abusive parents, and rapist would-be husband, locked up for a good deal more years to come (as menaces to society), she may have found it difficult to navigate the straight and narrow.

These days, missing the straight and narrow would probably mean she would probably become a single mother. Food stamps, assistance to mothers with dependent children, and federal housing subsidies, would provide her with a fairly "good" and "independent" life – though she would probably prefer to have a proper family. Single mother parenting is a tough job.

Welfare mothers, however (at least the smart ones), tend to be somewhat cautious about marriage. For one thing, it's difficult for women in such a situation to find a good, dependable, man with a decent job. Welfare moms often make good pickings for a certain class of ne'er-do-well men who are eager to enter into a loving relationship – but without the responsibilities of having to support a family.

By marrying, and losing her "single mother status," she would stand to lose her "independent" federal and state provided income, and thus her independence. If the father or fathers were even around, they'd be cautioned to keep a low profile and take care to be absent when the social workers came calling to inspect the household.

Chances are, Grandma would be encouraged to abort most of her children. But it would be a tough decision to make. She would know her parents would have considered abortion a dreadful sin. On the other hand, though more kids are quite an additional responsibility, they would qualify her for an increase in assistance. So she might no opt for abortions. After all (as they say), three can eat almost as cheaply as two – and the extra "assistance income" would look pretty much like a very welcome, and "well earned," pay raise.

Today, after doing their time, grandpa and the great grandparents would have had to register as sex offenders. As convicted felons, with the added stigma of being "sex offenders," they would have a difficult row to hoe on the outside. Chances are, they would qualify for job training and some sort of state and federal assistance. Social Security might be available to all three. Chances are, they'd spend the rest of their days in impoverished, non-productive, leisure.

Grandpa might have been too young to qualify for SSI when he got out of the big house. But he may have gained valuable friends and outside contacts while in prison. He may have learned bank robbery, or some other lucrative trade or criminal profession – so, possibly, he may have been able to do well in spite of being an ex-con.

Fortunately, as it turned out in that earlier, more barbaric, and unenlightened era, everything turned out fine. All of them lived long, productive, and relatively happy, lives. Not one of them ever had to depend on any state or federal handouts during their lives. Great grandpa retired on a railroad pension, and grandpa retired on a coal miner's pension, savings, and Social Security. Grandma, after her child bearing years, became a beautician and beauty shop owner.

Oh, but today it might have been so very different.

Of course, this is a different day and age. It's appropriate for ladies to avoid early marriage in order to explore their broadening options in life. In a world already suffering from overpopulation, child-bearing and housekeeping is no longer viewed as positively as it once was. Population and birth control are far higher on the agenda than traditional family life. The girls have so many options now that it's a wonder we still have any traditional families at all. It simply isn't cool.

In view of this, maybe same sex marriage does make some sense. Perhaps that should be the only sort of marriage allowed anywhere for about two or three generations. This would solve the population problem.

But Pridger can't help but think something is woefully wrong with our Brave New World as it is presently unfolding. There are a lot of reasons for this assessment. But one salient fact is that the brightest, most productive, and most highly educated, men and women are not reproducing themselves. Their birth rate is way below replacement levels. And this does not bode well for the survival of that particular species.

By far, the highest birth rates are among the poorest, most ill-educated, and least productive, classes of people. They continue to multiply and be plentiful – and an embarrassing percentage of them raise their children in single mother households, largely at the expense of the taxpayer.

Another embarrassing percentage comes from the men and women of that class, (some one percent of the entire population of the nation), are now housed in jails and state and federal penitentiaries 100% at public expense! The overwhelming majority of them are men, and the overwhelming majority of those are men who have effectively been "cast off" by society.

It seems the proper place for traditional men is in the jails and penitentiaries (as guards or inmates) – and, of course, we need lots of police, lawyers, and prosecutors. The proper place for upwardly mobile women is in the various professions – aerospace, the media, corporate board rooms, the armed services, combat, social workers, and the White House, etc..

With so many non-productive, publicly supported, citizens in our nation (with government either paying "entitlements" or wages and salaries) – and in spite of the fact that our population is already higher than it should be – we seem to have a labor shortage. So, we continue to swell our population with immigrants to do both the dirty work and an increasing percentage of the brain work. The lion's share of the hard labor is being imported from Mexico. The rest is coming from an array of other Third World countries. Most of the brains are coming from India and other Asian nations. Our "system" has even figured out how to electronically outsource knowledge work.

The YFZ Ranch was a peaceful, productive, highly self-reliant, and totally self-supporting church community of somewhere around 800 men, women, and children. The State of Texas made a concerted attempt to destroy that community and put at least two thirds of them on 100% public assistance, and as many of the residue as possible into the penitentiary (where they, too, would also be 100% supported by the taxpayer). And, of course, the State of Texas was acting with the very best of intentions.

If there isn't "something wrong" with this, then Pridger just doesn't know what "something wrong" is.

Eldorado, Texas law enforcement and its "political establishment" (not to mention Children and Family Services), were firmly behind the raid on YFZ Ranch. To many of the local people, the ranch community was an alien and frightening presence (sort of like the hippies were to many communities back in the 1970s). But the residents of the ranch merely wanted to be left alone. But the Eldoradans may rue the day the raid took place. What they actually accomplished was sort of a declaration of war against the ranch residents. Now the ranch residents are somewhat resentful and angry. It seems the YFZ Ranch community has decided to take part in the political process itself – something they'd never particularly aspired to before. All the adults are registering to vote! Ouch!

John Q. Pridger

Wednesday, 28 May, 2008

HOMOSEXUAL "MARRIAGE" A SAD SIGN OF THE TIMES

With the California's Supreme Court ruling lifting the ban on so-called gay marriage, the enemies of the Republic have gained another victory. Another battle in the cultural war has been lost, at least temporarily.

Not that homosexuals who want to marry are necessarily enemies of the Republic, of course. It's the fact that same sex marriage has even come up in the first place – that homosexuals, as a class of people, have gained the political power to overcome, and make a literal mockery of tradition and the moral values of the majority. That something traditional majorities have found repulsive and unclean throughout the Christian era becomes "legally acceptable," and thus "officially encouraged." The rise and legitimization of homosexuality bespeaks the continuing decline of the traditional moral culture of the nation.

Not not quite as morally repugnant as the legalization of the pre-natal infanticide encouraged by Roe vs. Wade, the same sex marriage issue is just as significant a bellwether of generalized repudiation of the Christian ethic as a national standard.

Quite frankly, there are an increasing number of people people (even people professing Christianity), who simply don't see a problem with same sex marriages. People like Pridger are beginning to feel out of step. Our public schools teach our children to accept what the older generations considered unthinkable. They are taught that it is not the sexual aberrant who is out of step – it's those of us who cling to traditional moral values who are out of step.

They tell us that polls now indicate that 51% of Californian voters no longer object to the idea of same sex marriage. The older generation is passing on – and apparently the California Supreme Court justices feel that the older generation was wrong and the younger generation of voters are right. Pridger's Old Pappy used to refer to the younger generation as the "younger de-generation." And Pridger, now a member of the older generation, came to agree with him about three or four decades ago. Polls in California seem to validate this view.

Holy matrimony itself, and sacred vows, are increasingly considered somewhat of a joke. Divorce, which was once discouraged and rather difficult to procure, is easier than marriage. The sacred vows that promise "until death do us part" have only temporary meaning, or no meaning at all. Living together is more popular than marriage with an increasing percentage of heterosexual couples.

While heterosexuals are gradually freeing themselves of the responsibilities of marriage, creating and nurturing families, homosexuals are demanding that they be allowed to tie the knot. Our national culture is literally turning upside down.

Many married and unmarried couples merely want to play at "house" for a few years before going their merry separate ways – and they want to do it without too many binding ties. More and more frequently, they eschew the tax and other material benefits of marriage, since both have their own separate professional life and their own incomes.

Homosexuals want all the same things "married couples" have had. And they want the official right to have binding ties so they can feel "legitimate" and hold their heads proud and high. And they want the official material and tax benefits that married couples have traditionally had available.

The growing consensus of our increasingly cosmopolitan heterosexual population is, "Who cares? What's marriage anyway, but a barbaric relic of another era? What difference does it make if men marry other men or women marry women – or dogs or horses, for that matter? It's a free world!"

Who cares? Indeed! Everything else about the country is going to hell in a hand basket. Why fight it? That's a good question.

Pridger is neither a prude nor particularly religious – and not at all in the fundamentalist since of the word. He's not exactly a shining example of traditional moral rectitude, and has led the life of a social maverick. He's very much a child of the Enlightenment, and has been a life-long male libertine. He's been a professional sailor throughout his working career – liberally partaking of the forbidden fruits and pleasures of the fleshpots of the world over a period of over five decades.

In short, Pridger is a prime example of a historic human moralistic double standard – the "do as I say, but not as I do" factor. He was the devoted husband and father when at home, and a bar to bar carouser when in ashore "good ports" abroad. Why would he care? Why would he take issue with something like same sex marriage?

In spite of Pridger's many faults and failings, he has always been somewhat of an idealist. Order is better than deadly chaos. Good taste is better than bad. Common decency and civility are better than decadence and unbridled effrontery. Love is better than hate. Beautiful music is better than hate music. A forest is more wholesome than a land fill. A pasture is more aesthetic than a parking lot. And, despite failings and shortfalls of religion, societal grounding in religious moral teaching is far superior to unbridled hedonism. Freedom, and responsible self-governance, is superior to the nanny police state. The traditional family environment is much better for children than state run orphanages.

With regard to marriage and family, the natural order is clear – regardless of religion. Perpetuation of the species depends on male-female intercourse – and social stability, and the proper nurturing of the young, depends on the stability of the traditional nuclear family arrangement. The male's essential role is to be the provider-warrior-protector and the female's essential role is to be the bearer of children and the teacher and nurturer of the young. And the husband and wife team have a natural, and universally recognized, duty to provide a wholesome and stable home environment for themselves and their children.

Of course, it takes all kinds to make a world. Yet, those who prefer sexual relations with the same sex, and desire to maintain domestic arrangements on that basis, are aberrations – out of step with the natural order. The only ones who would deny this would be homosexuals themselves, and an increasing cadre of societal, cultural, and political, wreckers and destroyers.

Granted, such aberrations as homosexuals are "common" in all societies, and society must make humane and enlightened allowances for this. Nobody should be cruelly ostracized for being out of step. But to officially place them on exactly the same social and legal footing as what is clearly the natural order is destructive to a rational, orderly, society.

Pridger would define a rational society as one wherein right and wrong, wholesome and unwholesome, are clearly delineated – where moral education is considered the foundation upon which the scientific knowledge base is constructed. Among other things, leaving traditional morality out of our educational structure – and making sexual aberrations appear "normal" – sends exactly the wrong message to our youth. While such aberrations must be tolerated, they should not be encouraged by mandating they be considered as "normal" as the sexual activities and relationships necessary to human procreation.

We worry terribly about health and hygiene in our society these days. The modern toilet replaced the old outhouse a long time ago – essentially for reasons of hygiene and public health. We've learned the importance of washing our hand after using the toilet. One of the first hygiene lessens our mothers taught us was that we shouldn't play with, or insert our fingers into, our own, or anybody else's, bottom plumbing. Contact with human feces, within or without the body, has universally been condemned and shunned for good reason. Simply put, it stinks, and it's unhealthy. There is nothing more repulsive to most people – or potentially infectious – than human feces.

The unnatural sexual activities of male homosexuals are thus demonstrably as unwholesome and unclean as can be imagined – that is, if the habitual (unavoidable), contact with human feces, through a sexual fixation with the anal canal, could be considered unwholesome. This, if nothing else, should tell us that homosexuality should not be encouraged, simply on the grounds of basic hygiene.

It's inexplicable that this aspect of the subject of homosexuality is seldom ever mentioned in the ongoing social debate. Have we as a society become so terribly politically correct, and "sensitive" with regard to homosexuals, that basic hygiene cannot be mentioned in this particular regard?

Pridger bears no malice with this assessment. Let the homosexuals and lesbians seek and have their gratification. Let them set up house and be happy. Yes, they can be "families" too. Why not? But, in Pridger's opinion, legitimizing their relationships by officially recognizing them as "normal" and even "desirable" is a ghastly mistake which constitutes just one more nail in the coffin of a once great nation.

John Q. Pridger

But Tuesday, 27 May, 2008

WHY "BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA" IS SUCH AN UNLIKELY NAME FOR A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

There's little question that the names Hussein and Obama bring to mind America's two most officially despised individuals – Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. They are two individuals who have come to represent the Great Global Enemy. We called for both of their heads on a platter. One has been delivered up and lynched by his enemies in Baghdad (after an a "fair" trial, of course), and the other still alludes our forces.

The 9/11 attackers all bore names that similarly sounded strange to the ears of most Americans.

It's ironic that our very next president – immediately following the president who proclaimed Global War on Terror against men named Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein – could be named Barack Hussein Obama.

It's almost as if a large segment of the population somehow has a driving compulsion to embrace Obama because of this very fact. A president with that name would re-affirm our national commitment to integration and multiculturalism, if not outright abandonment of our national roots. It's almost as if by electing a Barack Hussein Obama president, we would somehow atoning for past sins of slavery and racism – and perhaps what we have done in Iraq and would still like to do in Iran (all with the best of intentions, of course).

Electing Obama would be something of an atonement for a large number of Americans – atonement for having been, say, born white and privileged rather than dark and oppressed. For others it would simply be a statement – the final break with our cultural attachment to what have been called "Dead White Men" – the men who conquered half of the world both intellectually and militarily.

It's Christian to love one's enemies – and for those who admit to being Christians, embracing Obama is like embracing the enemy who (it miraculously turns out), is really one's long lost or unrecognized best friend. For those who do not claim to be Christian, in our officially mandated "multi-cultural" America of the twenty-first century, it's simply cool to embrace alien cultures and denigrate one's own.

Possibly, now that we are oh so remorseful and guilt-ridden over being the descendents of conquering colonists and slave owners, we are also already a little remorseful for what we've done to Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and what we still intend to do to Osama bin Laden and maybe Iran.

Perhaps, by electing Obama president, we white Americans can atone for our historical and continuing sins. If Barack Obama becomes our president, as Commander-In-Chief, he will be guilty too – and we will no longer feel so guilty. A black president will help heal our guilt. We could feel better about ourselves.

Barack Obama promises change. But the very fact that he finds himself a finalist in the race for the presidency is a loud statement that we have already changed – and we've changed dramatically. But the change has demonstrably not been all good by any stretch of the imagination. Just listen to Reverend Jeremiah Wright if you doubt it.

Reverend Wright is an interesting study in what might be called a double edged sword personality. He represents a radical form of Civil Rights backlash (the Christian version of the Black Muslim backlash) – yet he, like many of his Black Moslem counterparts, also articulates a lot of very unpopular truths that we'd simply rather not hear.

The Black Muslim backlash against the society that had finally given full "Civil Rights" to blacks began the trend toward Afro-Centrism and the abandonment the Christian religion in favor of Islam. They saw Civil Rights as a "false liberation" with continuing institutionalized injustice. They saw Christianity as a white religion which had always betrayed Blacks – and they saw Islam as the most effective enemy of Christianity and western culture, and the key to their own true liberation.

They were throwing off the perceived chains of the Christian religion, and western culture itself, in favor of a culture they knew to be the enemy of Christendom and all Infidels. They championed a new cult of Afro-centrism, which flew in the face of everything most Americans (including blacks), had always believed.

In recognizing Islam as the most effective enemy of American whites and Christendom in general, the Black Muslims preempted Huntington's Foreign Affairs article (and later book), "The Clash of Civilizations" by some decades. And it was perhaps Huntington's article that foreshadowed, if not signaled, the new global enemy that we needed after the demise of the USSR – to justify our continuing military superpower status and our continued need for weapons of mass destruction.

Islam is a formidable enemy. Not that there is anything more evil in Islamic beliefs than in Judaism or Christianity. It would be untrue to say that Judaism and Christianity have not generated evil. All three religions share the same roots – the eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, warring philosophy of the Old Testament – with the belief that a vengeful and jealous God rules in Heaven and Earth.

Jesus, of course, had a different message. But most Christians have been very quick to revert to "Old Testament" religion whenever there was a clash of empires, nations, or civilizations. With us, the God of Jesus rules in times of peace and prosperity (at least at home), and the God of Moses rules whenever we have a serious dispute with others – just as in Judaism, and Islam. We try to practice Christian good will at home but tend to have an Old Testament foreign policy.

Ironically, the Christian nations seem to have had a far worse record when it comes to being peace loving peoples (the Mongols excepted, perhaps). Both Islam and Judaism have been far more pacific than Christians throughout the history of Christendom.

Since the Biblical dispersion of the Jews, Judaism enjoyed the most pacific reputation of all – mainly because they never had a nation of their own. They had survived as minorities in many nations. While often oppressed, they were never oppressor. But since their return to Palestine, and the creation of the Jewish State, their reputation has changed dramatically.

However, if one ignores the fact that the Jews planted their state on somebody else's land (as our forefathers did on the North American continent), Israel's warring stance has always been defensive in nature, due to outside pressures. The main difference between our conquest of North America and Israel's conquest of Palestine, is that such conquests by "superior peoples" (i.e., stronger nations), became "politically incorrect" (even banned by international law), as the result of World War II.

Unfortunately for Israel, their timing turned out a little wrong. They "won their independence" from Great Britain's colonialism – but were still in the final act of wresting that land from the indigenous peoples (the Palestinian Arabs), at the time.

Fortunately, the United Nations cut Israel a lot of slack on this matter, since the United Nations was essentially the World War II Allies at the time. Great Britain wasn't thrilled at the turn of events at the time, of course, but Uncle Sam and Uncle Joe were.

The Enlightenment was born, nurtured, and developed to its highest form in the Christian nations of "civilized Europe." There are several other ironies of both religion and history in this. The European Enlightenment was driven largely by Christians who were beginning to openly repudiate their religion. The irony of this is in the fact that in repudiating their religion through increasingly "liberal ideas," they were actually more closely approaching the teachings and wisdom of Jesus – though few would acknowledge this fact either then or now.

Another irony was that the Enlightenment did not hamstring the adventurous spirit of the Anglo, Saxon, Teutonic, Franks, and Celt, peoples. Nor did it temper their appetite for profits and power. And it did not extinguish racial or national pride. It spiritually and materially armed them to go out into the world of the unenlightened and take what they wanted. Christendom remained as evangelical as Hell in spite of all the Enlightenment – and the the colonial powers went on to dutifully shoulder the "White man's burden."

When the Europeans went out into the world to discover it, conquer it, and bring home whatever would bring a profit, they tended to leave most of the Arab world alone. They had learned a valuable lesson during the Crusades. The Mohammedan had been expelled from west of the Bosporus, but the Arab has yet to be defeated and ruled for any length of time by Western powers in the Islamic regions of the Holy Land, Arab Peninsula, and Persian Gulf. The Enlightenment had slightly diminished the desire to take possession of the Holy Land. There was little they wanted from the Arab nations beyond safe sea passage around their lands – at least until oil became a factor in geopolitics.

It's the temperament of the Arab and kindred races that make them strong and proud. They are the children of harsh and unforgiving environments, and lands they have occupied for millennia. Their Islamic religion has toughened them even more.

This, of course, is in addition to the fact that the Arab and other Semitic peoples had provided one of the launching pads of western civilization itself – and had contributed greatly to human knowledge and scientific thought, poetry and literature – not to mention religious thought. There is a very good reason that we favor the Arabic numeral system over the more western Roman system. Mainly, it was much better, and easier to use for mathematical calculations.

When it comes to national strength of character, the Islamic nations of the Middle East are fortified by a degree of religious faith that makes modern Christendom pall by comparison. The nations of Western Europe have practically repudiated their religion. They no long have a faith – and in their new "openness" they are slowly being colonized by Moslem immigrants who cling steadfast to their own faith.

America, in spite of its majority profession of religious faith, is traveling the same road. Nations without a unifying religious faith seldom survive very long. And herein, at least in part, lies the reason a presidential candidate named Barack Hussein Obama has attained such popularity. It signifies a break with the past – one that doesn't exactly bode well for our future (in Pridger's humble opinion).

Before the great social turmoil of the mid-twentieth century in America, most immigrants tried to totally assimilate and become "Americans." Most were of kindred races of the original settlers and conquerors. They usually Anglicized their names soon after arrival. The adopted Anglicized "Christian" first names, and generally adapted the surnames as well. This was a requisite to becoming an "American." Hollywood was very generously populated with stars who had changed their names in order to entertain Americans and "be Americans."

This desire to be American in name as well as domicile, is no longer as compelling as it once was. In the wake of Civil Rights, Blacks actively started un-Christianizing and un-Americanizing both their names and their religion, in order to show their racial pride and newly discovered loyalty to their cultural roots.

Even Black Christians developed a separatist religion, as in Reverend Jeremiah Wright's brand of Black Liberation Theology. They chose to characterize Jesus Himself (a Semite), as a "person of color" – thus "Black." (The British, in particular, had generally referred to all members of non-European races as "blacks." This was the polite term. Likewise, a wide swath of white Americans likewise applied the "N" word to all non-European races.)

Other immigrants have followed suit, no longer Americanizing their names, or melting into the American mainstream. Increasing numbers of immigrants maintained as much of their native cultures as possible. This is what the "New America" was all about to immigrants.

America was being transformed – not only by immigrants, but by an evolving political culture which was increasingly hostile to its own foundations. The American Creed, and uniquely American political institutions, and American culture (for lack of a better word), were under attack from all quarters. And they remain under attack, both from within and from without.

Barack's father was not even an immigrant. He was a political functionary from Kenya, and a representative of his particular tribe. He came to America for the purpose of gaining an education in geopolitics and economics, and took his education and returned to Kenya. His marriage to Obama's mother was little more than a temporary tryst with a conveniently cosmopolitan white libertine. He abandoned his son to pursue his political calling in his home country.

The young Barack received the full benefit of his cosmopolitan parentage and went directly to and through an A-1 educational process that eventually landed him where he is today. But his youth experiences, education, and mixed race, had left him with unusual choices.

He chose not to change his name to make it more "American." That idea and custom had already been discredited in the "American mind." He was, he finally determined, Barack Hussein Obama, not Barry, George Washington, or William Clinton Obama. And he chose to join a church in which Black Liberation Theology was the theme, rather than a mainline Christian church, white or black.

Barack Obama's presidential candidacy and popularity (particularly among whites), is very symbolic of the changes that have already occurred in the nation. And, as Obama is quite generous in stating, he's about even more change.

Unfortunately, that change is not about becoming the nation that was promised in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. Those revered documents are preserved under glass and are now merely relics of what we once aspired to be as a nation. Like John McCain and Hillary Clinton, Obama is a New World Order man before he is an American.

But there are two kinds of New World Order men. And comparing Obama with McCain gives an apt illustration of the difference. McCain is a New World Order warrior who envisions an order ruled by American military might in support of financial capitalism. Obama is more of an anti-nationalist pragmatist. His New World Order would have to be ruled by non-national, or supra-national forces in support of financial capitalism. Neither camp cast an eye to the American Declaration of Independence, Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

Both champion the idea of a strong and just America. But both camps continue to knock out the pillars of national strength and unity.

Both New World Order models are destined to crash upon the rocks of frustrated human aspirations and opposing power blocks.

In the end, of course, the coming contest between Barack Obama and John McCain will be more about race than politics or national aspirations. It will be a tough contest to call. Relative racial numbers, naturally, favor McCain. But the question that will determine the outcome will be, how many whites have repudiated the idea of a white America, Euro-centrism, and the perception that western culture has been a positive influence?

Almost half a century after the advent of the United States Department of Education and our new way of looking at ourselves and teaching our young have taken a toll.

THE WAR DIVIDE

Obama is for cutting and running. McCain is for "staying the course." Americans have grown tired of our war in Iraq. Most have come to think of it as a ghastly mistake – and it's beginning to hit them where it hurts, right in the SUV!

So the war issue is now perceived as McCain's weakest point. Yet McCain is running on a platform of standing tough. In fact, as far as Pridger can see, that's about all McCain stands for that differs from his Democratic opponents.

We must not forget, however, that presidents are very prone to promising one thing and delivering another.

Iraq is a mess. And when you are engaged with a tar baby, it is exceedingly difficult to make a graceful exit. Obama is likely to find that it simply can't be done – gracefully or otherwise – at least in the short term that he advocates.

McCain has emphatically and repeatedly stated, "I will never surrender in Iraq!" So Pridger wouldn't be surprised to see him simply smile, declare victory, and leave.

After all, we won four years ago when Bush declared victory. That was the only military victory we're likely to have in Iraq. It's certainly the only "victory." Everything else has been an attempt to build a unified democratic, "business friendly" Iraq. That attempt has failed miserably. It wasn't the cake walk we'd expected. But we won the war. We defeated Saddam's military forces and have seen the dictator hang. Perhaps that's victory enough after all.

Perhaps this is wishful thinking. But it's no less likely than seeing Obama successfully overcome the will of the military-industrial complex political establishment.

What we ultimately do in Iraq will not be determined by the president. Whatever president is elected will have to march to the tune of the established machinery behind the throne. If he balks, some grounds for impeachment will be cooked up. It that fails, something else will happen. In any case, tremendous pressure will be placed on the president to "see the light." If leaving Iraq is in the cards, it will happen. If not, it will drag on until something melodramatic happens to change the course of history.

Israel's goals with regard to Iraq have largely been met. Iraq is a fractured, impotent, nation and is no longer a threat to Israel for the foreseeable future. Iran is now the major threat. Whoever the president is, will either have to deal with that or disappoint Israel. If we go after Iran, Iraq will continue to be required as our primary forward military base. The decisions will be made in the think tanks, not the Oval Office.

John Q. Pridger

Friday, May 23, 2008

MORE CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST

Now John McCain finds himself eating the same kind of crow that Obama has had to swallow – apologizing for the views expressed by preachers he's guilty of having solicited the support of. One preacher was apparently found guilty of saying God had been in charge of things during the Hitler and Holocaust era. Another preacher had said hurricane Katrina's treatment of New Orleans was the results of the wrath of God due to that city's pride in its "sin-city" image.

Unlike Obama, who remained loyal to his old friend (with pleas of ignorance of his message – at least until the friend stabbed him in the back), McCain was quick to disavow the preachers who had paid him the favor of their support and official endorsement. He rejected their endorsement – putting them down though they had the best of intentions toward him.

If every presidential candidate had to reject the endorsement and support of everybody known to have made controversial statements, they'd be in dire straits. How could Obama accept the endorsement of any of the Black Liberation Establishment? What about supporters who have been known to stretch the truth beyond recognition? For example, how could McCain accept the official endorsement of President Bush? How could Hillary allow the official endorsement of her husband?

Hillary has put her foot in her mouth again. It seems one of her rationales for staying in the race to the last minute is that her opponent could be assassinated before the convention. True enough perhaps, but it went over like a lead balloon. The most cynical will be speculating on whether or not Hillary "knows something" – or, worse yet, is "planning something." No. Most likely, she's merely a pragmatist.

John Q. Pridger

COINCIDENCE OR DIRTY TRICKS?

Mitt Romney was a viable Republican presidential candidate and a member of the "Mormon" Church of the Latter Day Saints.

Ron Paul is also a Republican presidential candidate. He's a champion of the Constitution and sound money – the only candidate of that particular brand. Liberty Dollar (a private mint), had honored him by placing his image on a special issue of Liberty Dollar coins.

THE FEDS MOVE AGAINST LIBERTY DOLLAR

Liberty Dollar had been operating for at least a decade, and broke no laws. Yet the offices of Liberty Dollar were finally raided by the feds last Fall, and their gold and silver confiscated. Was this a coincidence, or was the raid timed to make Dr. Paul and his ideas for sound money look bad, and somehow connected to illegal activities?

What served as an excuse for the raid? Apparently a Liberty Dollar owner tendered a Liberty Dollar for a purchase at a store. Gotcha! A trivial incident construed as a major assault against the federal monetary establishment!

THE FEDS MOVE AGAINST A MORMON CULT

How was it that Warren Jeff, the spiritual leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints. He was wanted for allegedly arranging "marriages" between adult men and under-age women. This horrendous allegation earned him a place on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted" lists – right up there with Osama bin Laden and other high profile terrorists and mass murderers? Can a man who arranges marriages for his church followers be reasonably compared to Osama bin Laden? Or did somebody just want the public to focus on Mormonism?

The YFZ Ranch, an establishment of Warren Jeff's Church, was recently raided by the Texas authorities – resulting in the most massive kidnapping in the nation's history. Could the machinery that ultimately resulted in the raid have been set into motion while Romney was still a candidate, in hopes it would discredit him if he were still in the race?

Is there something fishy here, or were these things mere coincidence?

John Q. Pridger

MORE CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST

It looks like the advocates of law, order, and child welfare in Texas are going to have to eat a little crow too. It seems Armored Personnel Carriers and SWAT teams posted at the perimeters of Yearning for Zion Ranch – not to mention the police raid and state kidnapping of over 400 women and children from that religious community – have been adjudged "unjustified" by some competent judges of the Texas court system.

At least some of Texas' legal establishment appears to be functioning on a rational basis at some levels – with some regard for constitutional principle and common decency. Maybe justice will even prevail in this case yet. Maybe those children and young ladies will be allowed to return to their homes where they belong.

Maybe the notion that raiding a peaceable community and removing hundreds of women and children is not yet universally acceptable in this land of the free and home of the brave – yet. The police state may be metastasizing but, thankfully, it is not yet universally accepted in all of the courts.

"Shock and Awe" has never really played very well on the domestic front. It didn't play well in Waco or at Ruby Ridge when the federal government gallantly showed its stuff. And it didn't play well at the YFZ Ranch where the State of Texas showed its hand. It may have played pretty well – at least in the American media – in Iraq. But the Iraqi people (the alleged beneficiaries), probably have a totally different take on it.

As for prosecuting alleged crimes that may have taken place behind the gates of YFZ Ranch – it seems "the authorities" will have to address them as if the the church members were entitled to the same sort of protections and due process accorded to "regular" Americans who live in even more lawless communities. Why not? LA gang members get the benefit of due process. Why not peaceable church members?

And what kind of crimes are we talking about? "Maybe" a few women were married at ages the law considers too young. "Maybe" some of them didn't really want to get married that young. "Maybe" some of the younger girls are "at risk" of being similarly "abused" when they get older. "Maybe" some of the boys are "at risk" of grow up to be abusers. "Maybe" there were other types of child abuse going on in the community. "Maybe" crimes that haven't even been thought of yet were committed there. "Maybe" the entire flock – its religion and its teachings – ought to be outlawed for promoting institutionalized "abuse."

There are a lot of "Maybes" and "possibilities" there (as there would be with any community in the nation), but, so far, not a single certainty that any actual "crimes" have been committed by church members.

But there are many certainties. It is a certainty that the State of Texas raided a peaceable community of apparently happy people, and essentially kidnapped over 400 women and children. It's a certainty that the authorities would have totally destroyed that community given full reign to continue their course of action.

As Pridger sees it, the way the people of YFZ Ranch have been dealt with constitutes a massive, and very real, crime – the bare-faced act of an oppressive, authoritarian, regime (with all of the requisite "good intentions," of course).

It was a certainty that "the authorities" thought their raid and summary action was the legal and right thing to do. It would also seem just as certain that they were wrong in believing they had the right and duty to do what they did – unless, of course, Texas is in fact a full fledged police state. For now, at least, a court and team of respected judges have said it isn't.

Some head should roll over this fiasco, but they probably won't. Vested "Authority" will attempt to have the last say, and we have not seen justice served yet. We can only hope for a happy ending.

John Q. Pridger

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST

The fallout from Reverend Jeremiah Wright's statement that the 9/11 attack was America's "chickens coming home to roost" seems not to have hurt Barack Obama's chances at the Democratic nomination too badly. All Obama had to to do was to disavow that particularly inflammatory remark, along with several others.

It's rather ironic (and very telling on our modern political culture), that a presidential candidate must disavow truth in order to remain a viable candidate. While Rev. Wright might be a racial agitator, that doesn't change the fact that his "chickens coming home to roost" statement comes closer to truth than anything a presidential candidate can come close saying with regard to what caused 9/11. Discounting the wilder conspiracy theories (for example, that it was "an inside job"), 9/11 certainly didn't happen in a total cause and effect vacuum. It didn't happen simply because a rag-tag gang of Islamic extremists decided they hated America's democratic institutions and our economic prosperity.

It happened because of a long chain of Middle East foreign policy that hasn't sat very well with many of those in the neighborhood – policies pursued over a long period of many decades. Those policies had specific geopolitical goals that seem perfectly rational to a political leadership with an "imperialistic global agenda," but has nonetheless caused considerable blowback from places that don't quite share its global-girding agenda.

Petroleum riches made the Gulf States a huge geopolitical football beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century. The a Jewish presence in Palestine (and later the Jewish State), was intended to be a liberal west-friendly implant in the Arab world. It was thought to be a good idea. First because of it's strategic location in the eastern Mediterranean near the Suez Canal, and later additionally due to it's proximity to the greatest petroleum reserves on the planet.

There was not a great deal of anti-Semitism on the part of Arabs and Moslems initially. While infidels, Jews were very much the lesser of two evils when compared to Christians. Most Arab and Muslim states had hosted small Jewish communities, and smaller Arab Christian communities throughout their Islamic history. Until the establishment of the Jewish State, on what had been Arab land, these communities had coexisted in some degree of harmony with their hosts. With the establishment of Israel, and the humiliating loss of the Arab Israeli wars, Arabs naturally became hostile to Jews.

Due to our support in the most recent of those wars – and our continuing support for Israel, right or wrong – they have become increasingly hostile to the United States. Oil money alone, and aid in the case of countries like Egypt, has bought friendship with the few Arab states that we still consider "friends."

After the 1967 Arab Israeli War, Israel increasingly became viewed by Arabs as imperial America's Middle East proxy. And from the very beginning, the injustices visited upon the Palestinian Arab peoples have been the great 800 pound guerrilla in the mix. The injustice was invisible to most Americans, and of little import to our diplomats and politicians, but quite visible, and of great import, to all Arabs and Islamic states in the Middle East. To the Arabs, we have been the ready and willing accomplices of the ongoing injustices suffered by the Palestinian people.

And finally, the camel's back of resentment was broken in the wake of the first Iraqi war, when American troops took up permanent positions on Islam's holiest soil – thousands of miles from the soil they are sworn to defend.

For some odd reason, most Arabs and others in the Middle East still think in local terms, and take exception to an infidel global superpower trying to remake their world in its own image. It should be understood by now why our image isn't all that great in the eyes of, not just the Moslems and Islamic states, but almost the entire world.

OTHER CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST

While the continuing blowback from our historical Middle East policies remain a very serious thorn in or side, blowback and "chickens coming home to roost" are occurring on several other fronts too – with much more "here and now" effect to those of us holding down the homeland. And diverting our attention to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran isn't going to help for much longer. High gas prices have already plied a very large role in dampening public enthusiasm for our Middle East Crusades.

We could get out of Iraq and the entire Middle East relatively easily – using the old tried and true "cut and run" tactic – as we did in Vietnam. The Democratic candidates are running on that platform. But we can't get out of our domestic economic mess nearly as easily as we could get out of Iraq.

Clinton, Obama, nor McCain have a platform that deals with that. McCain is for "staying the course" in Iraq and elsewhere, and Clinton and Obama merely want to spend the money elsewhere (while continuing the War on Terror and threatening war with Iran).

Unfortunately, just as we are unlikely to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan any time soon – as yet we aren't even beginning to connect the dots on our domestic economic problems.

Gas prices at the pump are the results of chickens coming home to roost too. We got our big oil dependency wakeup call way back in 1973, with the first Arab oil embargo. That was when we should have got serious about alternative fuels and a sustainable, home based, national energy policy. That was 35 years ago! We don't like to hear that the chickens are coming home to roost, but they are in a rather troubling way, and with frightening speed.

We've done almost nothing during the past 35 years to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. We actually went exactly the wrong way, and now we're distressed over having to pay the Piper.

The 1973 Arab oil embargo should have been a wake up call with regard to our Middle East foreign policy too. It was prompted by the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. The Arab oil producers wanted to teach us a lesson. They did – but it didn't do any good.

At that time our leaders should have done a little more careful assessment of the potential long term effects of our Middle East policies. We should perhaps have taken somewhat more of an even handed approach with regard to the troubles in the region – maybe even noticed that the Palestinians had received a raw deal. But at that time we could hardly imagine having to pay respects to anything like common sense. We felt the Arab oil producers needed us much more than we needed them – thus we were on top of everything for the duration.

Aside from that, giant American oil companies were among the biggest players and profiteers in the Middle East Oil business – before, during, and since, the embargo. Islam itself was the least of our worries. The Palestinian problem was hardly a blip on the radar scope. Great injustices were merely ignored as being insignificant in the overall geopolitical landscape of the region. Oil profits made friends out of what were actually our natural ideological enemies – most particularly after the oil embargo and the price increases that followed.

By way of contrast, Brazil read the tea leaves back in 1973 and took the hint. As a consequence, Brazil is almost totally energy independent today, with their sugarcane based ethanol fuel industry. And being energy independent, they are much more independent in many other ways than we are.

Sizable flocks of chickens are coming home to roost with regard to our economy at this late date. The rising price of oil is only one of the flocks. But the price of oil, of course, effects the prices of literally everything else. Yet at the very core of all of our economic problems, both realized or in the offing, there is something much more fundamental. It's very nature of our monetary system and our money.

Monetary chickens have actually been coming home to roost for over a century, but nobody has paid much attention during most of that time. For most of that century the chickens only came to roost by twos and threes. But now they are coming home by the flock, with generations of government fiscal irresponsibility, bad trade policy, and downright bad economic science driving them.

Our system has become one of "Voodoo Economics" – a term G. H. W. Bush coined when he was a Republican presidential nominee running against Ronald Reagan in the primaries (circa 1979-80). The term was intended to describe Reagan's economic plan for the nation (i.e., business deregulation and balancing the budget while cutting taxes). Bush joined Reagan's team as vice president, and Voodoo economics has been the name of the game ever since.

As one pundit once called the results "Voodoo Doodoo" – declaring, "The only politically viable solution to Voodoo-Doodoo is more potent Voodoo-Doodoo. More potent Voodoo-Doodoo will inevitably lead to the ultimate Voodoo-Doodoo-BooBoo."

So now we're probably on the brink of the big booboo. When the economy is a literal house of cards built on shifting sands – waiting for the "big one" that'll bring the house down is not a very comforting situation to be in. But it wasn't Ronald Reagan's fault. He was neither an economist nor monetary expert. A well established "brain trust" was there to do the thinking. The foundation for the house of cards was laid on the sand a long time before the Reagan era.

The "four cent dollar" doesn't even ring a bell with most people. What's a four cent dollar? That's the purchasing power of today's dollar compared to the purchasing power of the dollar back in 1913 when the Federal Reserve System was initiated. Actually, the four cent dollar has been upstaged by something closer to the two cent dollar by now.

It's noteworthy that a $20.00 gold coin will buy just as much now as it would have back in 1913. Maybe more. The United States Mint will sell you a new full ounce silver dollar today for about $20.00 each. When Pridger first went out to seek his fortune in 1959, a dollar would rent a seedy hotel room in the heart of downtown New Orleans. If you can find a seedy little hotel in New Orleans today, you'd better be prepared to pay at least $40.00 – and it will likely be a long hike to the French Quarter.

Of course, a more familiar term for monetary chickens coming home to roost is "inflation." Everybody has heard that word. Over the last century, inflation has stolen 96 to 98% of the value of our money – the money we earn, spend, and save – something that is supposed to represent a fixed unit of value in the marketplace.

Value is leaking out of the dollar at an increased clip today – rising prices being the evidence that everybody can readily observe and experience. Inflation itself has long been institutionalized as part of our monetary system. The institutionalization of inflation itself as a necessary tool of monetary policy was facilitated by the decoupling the dollar from gold in the early 1970s during the Nixon administration, and inflation surged during the Carter years. That decoupling was made necessary by rampant, uncontrollable government spending – the Vietnam War and the War on Poverty (the advent of the welfare state), being the bales of straw that finally broke the camel's back.

The camel's back had been broken before. In 1933-4 our entire monetary supply, in terms of gold value, was devalued by over a third by the stroke of President Roosevelt's pen in the economic emergency occasioned by the stock market crash of 1929, and what ended up being called the Great Depression. The price of gold had been about $20.00 per ounce since 1793, then went to $35.00 an ounce over night – a big dose of chickens "coming home to roost."

It remained at $35.00 an ounce until 1967 when it began creeping upward on world markets. Foreign central banks started a run on American gold with their accumulating dollar reserves. The door on gold was slammed in 1972, and monetary policy has been out of control ever since.

Now, when the economy and its monetary system were founded on gold, as shaky as unstable as the underlying sand may have been, the sand was pretty well packed down and the economy pretty securely anchored. But when the gold foundation was removed, the house of cards constructed above became extraordinarily unstable.

Since then, money and credit have been absolutely integrated and confused. Today, with our dollar being a purely "credit" dollar, there is nothing at all of substance anywhere to be found in the monetary mix. The Federal Reserve Note is a "legal tender" bearer note representing not only a dollar's worth of debt, but perpetually accruing interest on that debt. There's absolutely no real value, and what nominal market value it has is always in decline.

Though government economists used to like to blame inflation on the demands of organized labor (causing a "wage-price spiral") – inflation is nothing more or less than systemic debasement of the currency. The fundamental cause – aside from greed and actual criminal intent at some levels – is fiscal irresponsibility made inevitable by the lack of a fixed-value benchmark for the dollar.

When inflation is combined with naturally rising market prices due to the declining availability of raw materials and increasing demand, we find ourselves suffering from multiple systemic double-whammies.

Credit itself, of course, is a particularly slippery and manipulative commodity. Debt, the essence of credit, is only as valuable and secure as the collateral that stands behind it. And as often as not that collateral is little more than the clever manipulation of smoke and mirrors. Because of this, trillions of dollars can be created out of nothing and trillions can be made to simply disappear (as in the value of Enron and World Com stocks, etc.).

The credit dollar makes it very easy to misallocate vast amounts of money – and this is done both by the government and mismanaged and misaligned market forces given the false cover of free market forces under the cover of enlightened financial capitalism and false economy. Financial capitalism, and this false economy, has come to be mischaracterized in the American mind as "American capitalism."

The only way to begin to correct the situation with lasting effect would be to reestablish an honest dollar. This is a daunting proposition, however – because too many chickens have come home to roost for too long, and more flocks are arriving in ever-greater profusion – and the world is literally flooded with fiat debt in the form of Federal Reserves money (all of which is debt American taxpayers are liable for).

The only presidential candidate to bring up the matter of monetary reform has been Ron Paul, the candidate from Texas. See several of his articles at:

http://www.ronpaul2008.com/articles/?tag=Federal%20Reserve

A plan for moving toward a gold standard (somewhat dated), is at:

http://www.ronpaul2008.com/articles/843/the-political-and-economic-agenda-for-a-real-gold-standard/

Also, see: The Ludwig von Mises Institute (h ttp://mises.org/)

John Q. Pridger

Friday, May 9, 2008

EFFICIENCY OF THE TRADITIONAL FAMILY FARM

We tend to think that our present agribusiness machine as the most productive and efficient in the world. But let's take a closer look.

Bushels per acre yields are plenty high. Man hours per bushels produced are way down. Prices of agricultural commodities remain comparatively low, and thus very competitive in both domestic and global markets. What more could we expect?

We have been looking at a five year $300 billion Farm & Food Bill for 2008. If our modern, corporate scale agricultural is so wonderfully efficient, why does the taxpayer have to subsidize it to the tune of $300 billion, or anything even approaching that amount?

On the face of it, we apparently have a "cheap food" policy that costs the taxpayers $1,000.00 for every man, woman, and child in the nation! This is $4,000.00 for a family of four. The numbers boggle the mind. Is this really a "cost effective" cheap food policy?

Another way of looking at is is that we must be paying our farmers far too little for what they produce. Why else would they need that much money in farm subsidies? This simply cannot be the result of anything approaching any kind of farm "efficiency" or agricultural planning. Obviously, something is so horribly wrong that it staggers the imagination!

Some types of farms, such as the big vegetable farms of California, aren't subsidized like those that produce the major commodity crops. Obviously, those farms (and many are very large operations), are not paid enough for their produce either. If they were, they would not have to depend on imported labor, including illegal aliens, in order to make a profit. If these farms were paid adequately for their produce, they would be able to utilize American labor – or at least be able to reject illegal aliens.

In any case, farmers themselves only get a relatively small percentage of the "farm" subsidies. "Farm" subsidy money goes to a whole array of non-farm industries and programs that only benefit farmers indirectly, or maybe not at all. One such program is the Food Stamp program that helps feed the poor. This program benefits a large number of non-farmers, from food processors to wholesalers and retailers, and farmers gets only a penny, or only a few cents, of each food dollar expended in the Food Stamp program. Foreign oil producers and energy companies probably get more of the Food Stamp dollar than the farmers do.

But the biggest, most profitable, farmers do get a lot more than could conceivably be considered their fair share of direct subsidies. Their share – over the last five years – has amounted to over $95 billion in subsidies to growers of "overabundant" commodity crops. Yet small organic growers – those who try to do things right, and should be most encouraged to increase production – only got about 1/10th of 1% of the Farm Bill largess.

Obviously, current policy not only misallocates funds, but does so grossly.

One of the biggest misallocations of funds is in the realm of "export subsidies." We are supposedly promoting and fighting for a global "free market" economy. But we subsidize the export of our most precious commodities so they can be sold abroad at prices lower than they can be produced for! This would appear to be the result of a form of madness. It not only warps our own market, but damages agriculture in the developing nations that cannot resist cheap food commodities any more than we can resist cheap Chinese consumer goods.

The problem here is our perverse idea that trade, for trade's sake, is "productive," while simple common sense tells us that trade ads shipping costs and not a penny of real additional value. If trade in our agricultural commodities is good and necessary – and it can only be good and necessary in the name of profits – why would it have to be subsidized? If we have to subsidize exports (any exports), something is sorely askew. This is something like paying someone in order to sell their goods at values the local market cannot, or will not, support.

While we are giving away our domestic consumer market, and thereby destroying our own industrial base, we are busily destroying traditional agriculture in nations that need to retain and improve their own agriculture, so they can produce more food for themselves.

The 1,000 acre monoculture farm, operated by a single man or family, with a few part-time hired hands, and some very big equipment, may seem the epitome of agricultural efficiency, but if that operation is not sustainable, and couldn't function without a multitude of off farm inputs, and must rely on large direct subsidies to turn a profit or avoid foreclosure, it can't really be termed efficient at all.

If it is a corn farm producing a minimum of 100 bushels an acre in a bad year, at $5.00 per bushel (grossing $500,000.00 a year), and cannot survive without a subsidy, something is grossly out of kilter somewhere.

THE OLD TIME DIVERSIFIED FAMILY FARM

To see a real efficient farming operation, let's rewind back several decades to Pridger's last family member who exclusively farmed for a living. This was Pridger's old step-grand pappy, Roscoe, a lifelong farmer. His farming career, and life, ended somewhere around 1960 when Roscoe was about eighty.

Roscoe was an old time farmer, and he and my grandmother, Sybil, had a 75 acre spread in a prime farming area in Southern Illinois. The kids were all grown and long gone from the farmstead, so there was just the two of them during the time period Pridger can personally recall.

Sybil kept a modest sized flock of chickens that produced a surplus of eggs, and a sufficient supply pullets and cockerels to grow into the makings of Sunday dinners. Of course, there was the single family milk cow, a Jersey or a Guernsey, which provided far more milk and butter than Roc and Sybil could themselves consume. The surplus eggs and butter were usually sold to non-farming neighbors or townspeople. Most of the surplus milk was fed to the hogs, along with other kitchen vegetable refuge, as "slops." The milk cow produced a calf each year which, when sold, provided a nice little stipend.

There were always three or four sows and a boar that churned out a few dozen young porkers for market each year, in addition to more than enough bacon, ham, fresh pork, and lard, than the household required.

The garden, mostly tended by Sybil, produced an abundance of fresh vegetables in season, the surplus of which, (after canning all that was needed for the winter months), was sold, or given away to friends and family. They didn't have an orchard, but there were a couple apple trees, a peace tree or two, and a pear tree – and these provided them with all the fresh and canned fruit they needed, including jelly and apple cider, with some left over to sell in town from the back of the pickup or give away.

This small farm family was essentially self-sufficient in most basic food stuffs. Things like salt, sugar, flour, baking powder, of course, had to be purchased – though often the flour came from the farm too.

The house, yard, garden, barn, and other buildings, along with the barnyard, occupied less than two acres. There was about a ten acre woodlot that provided fire wood, and all the lumber that Roscoe needed to keep the place up, plus providing a generous supply of hickory nuts and walnuts.

This left about 63 acres, more or less, for crops, hay fields, and pastures. Cash crops grown were usually wheat, corn, and beans, annually rotating fields used for each, including occasional rotation of the land used for hay and pasture to maintain soil fertility. Green manure crops were sometimes grown and turned under before planting time the following Spring to further enrich the land.

Roscoe had grown to middle age using strictly horses for farming, but had modernized into tractor farming by the time Pridger came on the scene. He had an old Allis Chalmers tractor of about 25 horse power, and all the essential equipment to do everything he needed to plow, disk, cultivate, mow, harvest, etc. And just about all the crop growing work that needed to be done could be accomplished by Roscoe alone. Sometime help was hired (usually boys from surrounding farms), for such things as getting hay up and into the barn, or harvesting the field crops.

By today's standards Roc's equipment would be considered woefully inadequate to do any serious farming. But for a man with perhaps 40 acres to cultivate and harvest, in any given year, it was more than just adequate. Though there was plenty of work involved, Roc and Sybil were on top of the world.

Roscoe would usually planted two or more different cash crops each year, so he'd have the commodities he needed for himself, as well as the diversify to spread his yield and market risks. He generally saved his own seeds from the previous year, so he didn't have to buy them, though he did grow some hybrid varieties when it looked like the most profitable way to go due to the promise of higher yields.

Besides rotating his fields from hay to cash crops, he fertilized his fields with manure from the barn and barnyard. He had never purchased commercial fertilizers, and didn't think them necessary. No pesticides or herbicides had ever touched his fields or the commodities he produced. Weeds were kept under control the old fashioned way, by "cultivation."

To simplify things for the purpose of illustration, we'll just assume Roc planted his whole 40 acres of crop fields in corn. Yields might have been only 75 bushels an acre in those old inefficient days using mostly open pollinated varieties. Still, that was potentially a total of 3,000 bushels at harvest time.

Perhaps 200 of those bushels of corn would have been stored in the corn crib, to be kept for his own needs. Corn fed to the hogs would be left on the cob, some corn was hand shelled (by a hand cranked sheller), to be turned into cracked corn for the chickens and cow, and meal for bread and other kitchen use would be milled from shell corn when as needed.

Like most farmers, Roscoe would take his grain to the local elevator and grist mill both to sell and/or to have milled for his own use. He would have any special feeds he required mixed by the miller, trading some of his grain for grains he had not grown himself.

Pridger won't go back to check on corn prices circa 1960, but $2.00 a bushel would probably be in the ballpark. So Roc's cash return on the 2,800 bushels he sold grossed out at $5,600.00.

Of course he had to buy gasoline (which sold at about $.30 a gallon then), and several other supply and repair items, so we'll guess his farming "input" costs over a year's period come to somewhere around a thousand dollars – leaving a net potential of about $4,600.00 for the year. Perhaps he had netted another $200 (a low estimate), on sales of pigs, calf, eggs, vegetables, fruits, etc, during the year, producing a total income of $4,800.00 for a year's work.

$4,800.00 would have been a pretty decent farm income circa 1960. A good industrial wage at the time was about $3.00 an hour, which would produce about a $6,240.00 yearly income.

In reality, Roscoe probably made considerably less than $4,800.00 in most years, but he still made a decent living and was able to keep up mortgage payments and buy all of the things country people thought they needed in those days. Roscoe and Sybil didn't lack anything of importance, and they missed nothing that they didn't have.

The point here is that Roscoe's 75 acre farming operation was the very epitome of real farm efficiency, simply because of it's self-contained productive nature. By the sweat of his brow he not only supported himself and his wife, but produced enough food commodities to provide the basis to feed at least score of other families. This is true efficiency. And he never needed to collect a red cent in direct subsidies from the government, though direct subsidies were probably knocking at his door by 1960.

There were once many millions of small farmers like Roscoe producing food for the nation. And if the far half of the world were to fall off, Roc and Sybil would hardly notice, and nobody in the country need go hungry.

During the first half of the twentieth century, a quarter to a third of the nation's households were farm families. They didn't have to be super efficient in order to feed the rest of the nation – and there was always an abundance of food commodities in storage and available for export.

Today we are in the peculiar situation of having to depend on significantly less than 2% of the population to produce our food. And if something happens to turn off the fuel supply, our farmers would be as paralyzed and likely to know hunger as the huddling, helpless, masses in our crowded metropolitan areas.

And, appallingly, our prison and jail population is fast approaching numbers that will exceed the numbers of farmers. In this so-called free market economy, government revenues and spending provide something like 50% of the financial wherewithal to stock the fires of commerce. The Amish are about the only class of people in our population who are as self-sufficient as Roscoe and my grandmother were – and the Amish that have stuck to their horses are a good deal more self-sufficient than they were.

Yes, in the 1960s there were already farm subsidies, in the form of parity price supports. But these price supports merely insured a fair price for basic storable farm commodities. And there was no price support in the absence of real production.

Parity pricing made it possible for millions of small farmers to prosper by the sweat of their brow without being slaves to creditors and mortgage companies. And it made it possible for the rest of the economy not only to prosper, but the rest of the people sleep easily at night. We had a kind of national security that has since been frittered away under the false colors of farming efficiency, and the factory farm.

Yet it costs us a lot more – both at the supermarket and on April 15th. A $300 billion Farm Bill! Efficiency indeed! Most of that money goes into the bottom line of the fat cats, while most surviving farmers, even the biggest and most productive of them, continue to struggle to make ends meet while they work themselves sick.

SOMETHING FOR NOTHING

Everybody wants something for nothing. Yet we all know that something for nothing is impossible unless one happens to be an outright beggar, or somebody else is cheated. In either case, somebody else is inevitably debited.

The only way a man can get something for nothing is by making something from scratch, at no cost to himself or anybody else – and that is only possible if no price is placed on his own labor.

In the real world, the closest thing to getting something for nothing is when a farmer takes a single seed, such as a grain of corn, and plants and cultivates it – and then harvests ears of corn with hundreds of such grains from that single seed grain. This is truly a miraculous act of production – the very next thing to "creation." And it is wealth creation – the creation of essential marketable commodities for the sustenance of life. It comes compliments of the sun and natural processes, carefully nurtured by human diligence and labor. There is nothing else that comes closer to magic in the field of what we call "production."

This is true wealth production at the ground level. The single seed – as a gift of nature, perhaps improved over time by the hand of man – costs almost nothing, but produces so many more duplicates that they can be gathered up and taken to the market and traded or sold for other items of value. And, after they have provided income for the producing farmer, they travel into trade channels with many value added stops along the way – finally being consumed after the last profitable stages of processing and marketing. This is the story of a continuing miracle, which too few stop to think about.

This is why it has always been said that "all real wealth comes from the soil." Nothing comes close to the miracle of agricultural wealth production, because (when done properly, with all due diligence), this particular kind of wealth production is eternally sustainable. It is an eternally renewable process, producing consumable value. And that's a very good thing, because agricultural production is also the most necessary kind of production. We all need to eat simply to maintain the privilege of drawing breath.

Only when we are fed can we engage in the next tier of real wealth production – that of extracting other natural resources from the ground – things like iron, copper, coal, gold, diamonds, etc. These non-renewable resources also come from the earth by virtue of the hand of labor. But they are different in nature from agricultural production. Raw materials extracted from beneath the soil, though a gift of nature, become less abundant as they are extracted.

But basic raw material production, whether agricultural or mineral extraction, are the basic essential "wealth creation" that forms the basis of any local or national economy. This is how new wealth – real wealth – comes into the economy. This real wealth creation is a "from the bottom up" process, rather than a "trickle down" process.

The effect of the $5,000.00 of "new wealth" Roc, through his personal labor, brought into the economy is as if he had created 5,000 new one dollar bills that had not existed before.

Now, when that produce, which was worth $5,000.00 to Roc at the elevator, makes its way into trade channels – from the elevator to the millers, to the feed and food processors, and finally to the grocery wholesaler and retailer – its value is significantly increased at every stage of the journey, providing the basis for more exchange, right up to purchase by the final consumer. The process is the same with other raw materials newly released into trade channels.

Raw material economists have calculated that each dollar of exchange generated at the farm level, provides an additional seven dollars in exchange through value added processing and final sale and consumption. This is called the "trade turn." In other words, Roc's production of $5,000.00 worth of new wealth, provided the basis and wherewithal for an additional $35,000.00 in new dollars to enter the economy.

Before the Department of Agriculture decided that we had far too many farmers and began the process that has since forced about 95% of them out of business, farmers like Roc provided the wealth basis for local communities. Much of the wealth that Roc helped to generate stayed and multiplied in the local economy. He spent almost his entire income with local merchants and farm suppliers. A significant percentage of the grain he produced was processed by local businesses – the local elevator, the local grist mills, the local bakeries, the local grocers, etc. These exchanges facilitated a host of other exchanges utilizing the money generated from the ground up.

Small farming towns throughout the nation were able to prosper in those days, as most of them had prospered and grown since they had been founded.

If this essential wealth production is shortchanged by under-pricing at the source, the entire economy suffers a debilitating consequence. The economy as a whole is short-changed at the rate of seven dollars to one. If there are not many farmers selling their production locally and supporting local towns and communities, those towns and communities whither. And this has been the story of rural America in the decades since the 1950s and 60s.

Pridger paid Roc's old farm a visit a few years ago. The landscape was changed beyond recognition. Farming had become much more efficient. The old Victorian farmhouse, the barn, and all of the outbuildings were gone. There was no sign that there had once been a home there. All the old field fence rows had been bulldozed away, and Roc's picturesque, and wonderfully compartmentalized, farm had been changed into one huge corn field. In all likelihood it was just one field farmed by one of the few remaining farmers in the neighborhood.

Yields are now probably about 150 bushels per acre on Roc's old farm, and corn was still selling at about the same price of $2.00 a bushel – when all associated "input" costs have risen by at least a factor of ten. High yield hybrid seed are used (perhaps even genetically modified seeds), coaxed into abundant harvests with petrochemical fertilizers measured in tons per acre, using herbicides and pesticides and "no till" technology. It was the picture of modern farming efficiency.

The smallest farming towns in the area have dried up through lack of business. Some of the bigger ones have grown and apparently prospered, in spite of stagnant or declining populations. But they have prospered on false economics – economics based on "trickle down" rather than local production and wealth creation. They essentially thrive on money from Washington and Wall Street finance. Most of the retail businesses are corporately owned by others elsewhere, and the profits are shipped elsewhere too.

The farm land is still there, of course, and crops are still abundant and are sold at the local coop – but they are shipped elsewhere and begin their journey through value-added processes in distant urban centers – the predominate profits all being made by others elsewhere.

The county's relatively few remaining farmers received some $50.5 million dollars in direct federal subsidies from 1995 through 2005. About two or three dozen farmers received the lions' share of that money. These subsidies permit those "successful" and "efficient" farmers to survive and produce – and sell their production into the world's markets at prices low enough to undersell inefficient Mexican farmers in their own country.

The farmers are still the primary wealth creators in the county, but in spite of they small number, are still grossly underpaid for their production in what passes for a free market economy. They are effectively cheated – so others, somewhere nearer the source of the trickle down money supply, can profit handsomely on their production. Money has to trickle down to those farmers, and the entire population, from somewhere up near the source. This is backwards economics and we now have a totally perverted economy.

Since all wealth comes from the soil, the model should be not trickle down, but trickle up. And not "trickle" up a gathering flow through value added processes in the upward economic chain. From initial wealth creation on the farms, and in the mines, wealth creation, through value added exchange and sale, literally mushrooms to the degree that the entire economy can be abundantly funded.

THE MISALLOCATION OF REWARDS

Hillary Clinton, for example, gained a hundred thousand dollars in "profit" from a thousand dollar cattle futures investment. What cattleman could ever hope to make anything like that kind of return for his labor and costs of actually raising the cattle? This should tell us something about how our economy is skewed to favor non-producers over producers.

Of course, farmers have always been at the mercy of enumerable adverse pressures, from weather and growing seasons, to the commodities markets manipulators and bankers always ready to profit at every turn on the backs of stressed borrowers. Farmers have never had control of their markets or their market prices. Naturally, the smart city kids are going to short-change him at every turn, given the opportunity. That's simply how "capital" is inclined to work.

From the time of the nation's founding, however, the value of farmers to the national economy had always been officially recognized.

Though Roscoe never received direct subsidies from the government, he may have received the benefit of government price supports for his grain, which were in force as a subsidy to agriculture. Without them, all of his work, as productive as it was, might have left him in poverty or worse. He might have had to quit farming and go to the city and get on relief, or welfare as it has become known.

All government subsidies are not bad. But the way the government subsidizes farmers, agribusiness, industry, and trade today are destructive to individual producers and systemic sustainability. The parity pricing concept for farmers, simply made sure the farmer was appropriately rewarded with a fair price for his production. The surpluses that farmers produced provided for those who were on relief.

Parity pricing for farm production worked so well during the war years that not only were the American people and the troops well fed throughout the war, but millions of farmers were able to prosper, and we still had food surpluses for foreign aid and trade.

After the war, these surpluses began to present a problem. They became excessive. Farmers were producing too much, because the extra demands of the war years were no longer there. The answer to the dilemma was to scrap the program that was working so well, because it was working too well. American farmers were actually too efficient for the current market! Rather than adjusting it for peace time conditions in an orderly way, the government began doing two things. (1) Paying direct subsidies to farmers for not planting their fields, and (2) determining that there were altogether too many farmers, and they we.

Thursday, May 8, 2008

FARM BILLS AND SUBSIDIZED FARMERS

Taxpayers resent subsidies to farmers. Most "traditional" farmers resent them too – they'd much rather just get a fair market price for their production. Unfortunately, most farmers are obliged to depend on subsidies for survival. Over a period of several decades, farm subsidies have changed the culture of farming in the United State – causing the corporate collectivization of agriculture and the consolidation of bigger and bigger farming operations.

Supposedly to help the small family farmer, the Farm Bills, and farm subsidies they facilitate, are made to order for the big Ag. corporations. Unfortunately, it's the big boys that always catch the hear of Congress. Big Ag and the "Farm Lobby" are not the small family farmer. Our Farm Bills have habitually encouraged the big fish to devour those little fish. The lion's share of the subsidies go to the top single digit percentile of the biggest and wealthiest farmers.

After well over half a century of misbegotten farm policy, it's a little late to "save the family farm" and thousands of small rural towns that once depended on and served them.

About the only thing we can hope for would be to reinvent the small family farm, and this is happening to a significant degree in the realm of organic growing and in specialty crops. But the numbers are still way too small, though consumers are willing to pay more for organic food. But – wouldn't you know it – the big boys are already beginning to import "allegedly organic" food from China!!! (Cheaper prices for imported organic foods are enough to prompt some consumers to trust their their own organs to the Chinese!)

The trouble with our farm policy has been that for a long time it was about getting rid of small inefficient farmers and encouraging the consolidation of farms into bigger, more "efficient" units. The message that came down from the Department of Agriculture beginning in the 1950s and 60s was "Get big or get out." And that is what has happened. It encouraged industrial scale farms that became more efficient through the economies of scale, and the increased use of petrochemical based fertilizers.

Traditional small family farms, and the methods used (which had been organic, diversified, and sustainable, by their very nature from time immemorial), were ridiculed and systematically undermined by official farm policy, beginning in the 1950s. And, since then, we have gone from being a nation with a resilient, productive, and sustainable agrarian infrastructure, to a nation of increasingly large, soil mining, chemical based, mega farms. Production didn't increase nearly as much as food vulnerabilities have, and the nutritional quality of our food supply has declined as well.

We won't get into a full discussion of farm policy here. But Pridger would like to make a few simple points.

Traditional small family farms – farms small enough to be worked by a single farmer and his family, using small equipment, whether modern or not – were the epitome of efficiency, simply because of their self-reliant and sustainable nature. Generally speaking, the small farmer was the best possible steward of both land and livestock. He produced his own seed, and harvested the seeds he sowed, without great volumes of industrial input over which he had no price control.
The only thing that small farmers needed in order to prosper on a pare with industrial workers was a fair price for production that he brought to market.
"Parity pricing" was devised to facilitate a critically needed delicate balance between farm and city. Farmers have never been organized, but commercial commodity traders are organized, and are able control the price farmers get for their goods. Their goal is to buy cheap and sell dear, and the less they have to pay the farmer, the bigger their own profits, and the better they like it.
Parity was devised before the era of "get big or get out," when most of the nation's farms were relatively small family operations. It set "fair" prices for farm commodities which would deliver to the average diligent farm family, a comparable living standard to that enjoyed by city dwellers and industrial workers.
Initially parity was calculated based on the 1910-1914 period, known as the base period. This was a period of time when, generally speaking, farmers were doing very well in comparison to his city cousins, and the economy was said to be "in balance." The price of corn averaged about $.642, and wheat was about $.884 per bushel. Those two prices were "parity" prices for the base period for those two crops. They represented the base of 100 for future parity computations.
From the base period on, parity prices would be recalculated periodically to correspond to increases in the costs of the services and manufactured goods farmers had to buy. What this more or less meant was that the price increases (including inflation), would work on behalf of the farmer, just as it did for the industrial laborer.
For example, between the 1910-1914 base period to 1967, the prices that farmers had to pay increased about 240%, or a factor of 2.4 (more or less the increase in the consumer price index). In the case of corn, parity at the end of 1966 would be $.642 + ($.642 X 2.4) = $2.18 per bushel. Parity for wheat would have gone from $.884 to $3.00 per bushel.
Parity prices were delivered in the form of government price supports (NEVER DIRECT SUBSIDIES), that insured that farm commodity prices would not drop below levels required to sustain a decent farm living standard. If the "market" did not deliver that price, the government would purchase and warehouse storable agricultural commodities to keep the price at or very near parity levels.
These stored basic food commodities served many positive purposes. (1) When prices went up between harvests, they were released into the market at parity prices, helping to level prices throughout the year. (2) They stabilized prices in the nation's markets ("playing the commodities futures markets" had not become the big game it has since become). (3) Surplus farm commodities in storage acted as our nation's emergency backup food supply, in the event crop failures or other catastrophes. (4) They provided the government with basic "relief" food supplies for the poor in this country, and (5) provided emergency aid to foreign nations in the event of natural catastrophes. And all this in the most cost effective way conceivable.
During our "get big or get out of farming" era (and to the present), Parity has been changed to different base periods that are less favorable for the farmer. Finally, Farm Bills have come to ignore parity entirely and increasingly focus on direct cash subsidies to farmers – and agribusiness.
     This is exactly the wrong kind of government intervention into agriculture. It has resulted in a total re-ordering of the nation's farming infrastructure, and all sorts of market perversions – such as paying some farmers not to farm (something that has understandably raises the hackles of taxpayers).
     Farm Bills have increasingly empowered huge commodity trading corporations and a whole array of theretofore unrelated or nonexistent agricultural businesses, to totally restack the deck with regard to farming, market prices, and marketing practices. Through cash subsidies, the biggest, most efficient, farmers were favored over marginal, inefficient, farmers.
     "Efficient" farmers were the ones who followed Department of Agriculture guidelines, including use of the latest emerging chemical and seed technologies, and the "get big" part of "get big or get out."
     These directions from the powers that be at the USDA transformed most remaining farmers from being the best stewards of our agricultural lands into accomplices raping the land, for maximum yield and return rather than sustainability. Toxic agriculture was the latest, biggest thing going. And it changed the farming life-styles from being one of the most healthy life-styles to one of the most unhealthy.
Direct farm subsidies have destroyed market pricing stability and provided a great windfall to agricultural commodity traders and other agribusiness big boys able to purchase farm commodities at lower than parity prices. A so-called "cheap food policy" has kept farm commodity prices way below parity, and too low to sustain family farmers, whose "inefficient practices" and size of operation, cannot command sufficient subsidy money to avoid bankruptcy and foreclosure.
The cheap food policy is not a policy on behalf of American consumers. The retail food market always sells for what the market will bear. The policy is actually to accommodate the big international trading concerns, to facilitate their international trade – selling from our high market into a lower priced markets abroad. American farm prices must be kept low enough to be competitive in international markets. All of this, of course, has been a formula for the destruction of the American family farmer.
The price for government maintained parity prices for farmers was much cheaper, more efficient, and much fairer, than present farm subsidies. MUCH cheaper! In effect, what our present direct farm subsidy programs do is to insure (at taxpayer expense), a sufficient volume of farm commodities to big commodity trading corporations who profit handsomely whether American farmers survive or not.
Meanwhile, these big food commodity power houses (such as Cargil, ADM, et. al.), are spearheading corporate agricultural development all over the world – producing farms and "farmers" that compete against American farmers in the international marketplace. This further insures their own power to keep prices depressed in this country – simply by importing agricultural commodities from their clients abroad whenever the prices rises here. And in developing competitors for efficient American farmers, they are destroying small farmers and farm economies overseas as well, as they have been destroyed here.
None of this works on behalf of the consumer as the public is led to believe. The public (98% of which is urban), hates farm subsidies, and thus farmers. The public thinks the Farm Lobby is made up of farmers. It isn't. It's made up of the big agribusiness corporations that hold surviving farmers captive to their Farm Policies. Farmers today are beholden to the agribusiness combines that control their markets and their destinies, no matter how bleak their own prospects become.
Big farmers can still do well in this country – thanks to subsidies that permit them to sell their production at fire-sale prices and still come out with enough to make mortgage payments, buy and fuel their big equipment, food, hybrid or GM seeds, and various chemical inputs (as long as they are big enough).
In a former era, farmers were able to produce abundantly for themselves and for the nation. There were enough of them, and they were self-reliant enough, to insure that no great catastrophe was likely to cripple the nation or cause hunger in our great cities. A solid, numerically strong, agricultural infrastructure, made up of millions of family farms, was the balance wheel of the economy and both the cornucopia and food insurance policy of the nation. And while doing all of this, even before "efficient" modern farming, they had always produced a great surplus.
All that was needed was a fair price for agricultural production in the local farm marketplaces around the nation. Parity laws provided the means by which that price could be delivered without fail, and that wonderful, and exceedingly valuable, infrastructure could be sustained.
Parity today? Corn prices are going through the roof, partly due to the demand for more ethanol production, and partly because of high fuel prices and other input costs. In November of 2006 corn futures sold at $3.00 a bushel. By May of this year it's in the $6.00 plus range – an incredible two year jump. But "honest" parity for corn (that is, based on the 1910-1914, and a subsequent 1946-1950, base period), was $11.70 a bushel in the year end 2000, when corn was selling in the $2.00 a bushel range! This was eight years ago! Parity for corn would probably be at least $15.00 a bushel by now.
The current price of around $6.00 a bushel is good news for big corporate scale farms, though their costs may be rising faster than the corn price. What parity pricing would have done, however, would have been to have made it possible for small family scale farms to survive and do well.
Wheat is now selling in the $8.00 a bushel range. Honest parity was around $15.21 a bushel back in 2000, and would probably be about $18.00 by now.
     What would $18.00 wheat do to the retail price of a $2.00 loaf of bread at the supermarket? There are about 60 pounds of wheat to a bushel – enough to make about 60 loaves of bread.
     $18.00 divided by 60 comes to $.30. Thirty cents would be the farmer's share of a $2.00 loaf of bread. That one pound loaf is made from about 98% wheat. If the farmer provides 98% of the ingredients, and gets only 15% of the price, it's pretty hard to blame farmers for the high price of bread.
     The bakeries and retailers could very easily continue to provide $2.00 bread if they were so inclined. It is bound to be possible to produce a $2.00 loaf from thirty cents worth of wheat – just as it is now possible from them to produce a $2.00 loaf bread with only thirteen cents worth of wheat.

Just over half a century ago, a thousand acres of prime farm land could support perhaps fifteen large farm families. Those fifteen families, in turn, would provide essential sustenance for perhaps twenty-five city families.

Today that same thousand acres may support only three small families. Their production may be capable of feeding the same twenty-five city families. Perhaps more.

The twelve families that are no longer producing on the land, however, have added to the numbers of people to be fed in the cities. But poverty and unemployment are growing problems in the cities. Direct subsidies, in the form of food stamps and support for mothers with dependent children, are required to keep the situation in the cities from being much worse than it already is. Meanwhile, there is no sizeable self-reliant farming base. The remaining farms are far from self-reliant, depending on mono-crop cash incomes. They buy their food rather than grow it. And their operations depend on increasingly expensive imported petroleum products for fuel, fertilizers, and other agricultural chemicals.

It's too much to expect the public to understand all of this. But our national brain trust in Washington should make an effort to understand it. They once did, but only briefly, in the middle years of the twentieth century. Parity pricing itself was debauched along about 1962 when a new parity base period was selected. The new period was 1957-1959 – a period when prices between the farms and the cities were not in balance. This was one of the heralds of "get big or get out" policy for American farmers.

If they do not re-discover the principles of parity, and a "user friendly" people-based "national" free market system (a capitalist system with a rational foundation in agrarianism and distributionism), Americans will soon discover what hunger, privation, insecurity, and fear, are all about.

The clock is ticking.

John Q. Pridger

MAY DAY, 2008

MONEY MATTERS – WHAT IS THE GREENBACK?

The Greenback Dollar
Its History and Worth
Compliments of Yamaguchy

THE GREENBACK DOLLAR

Pridger has always favored the good old Greenback dollar as the only viable, and potentially honest, alternative to our present Federal Reserve Notes, and the Federal Reserve System. Federal Reserve Notes are NOT Greenbacks, though they look like Greenbacks and we still call them Greenbacks.
Linked here is a history of the Greenback written in 1877, by Benjamin S. Heath (1821-1887). It gives the whole story of the rationale behind the Greenback, how it was supposed to work, and how the bankers who comprise the Money Power fought it tooth and nail, undermining the policy at every legislative step of the way.
The 1913 Federal Reserve Act, and the companion Income Tax Amendment passed that same year, was the ultimate triumph of the bankers' private monopoly over the peoples' money and the financial destiny of the United States.

FROM: http://www.yamaguchy.netfirms.com

MARCHING TO THE WRONG DRUMMERS

Thomas Jefferson said: "If the American people ever allow the banks to control issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then be deflation, the banks and corporations that grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied."
He believed "...that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies... This issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the Government to whom it properly belongs."
He also said, "...to preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds... our people... must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live... (with) no means of calling the mis-managers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers..."

Talk about prophetic warnings and sentiments! We have allowed banks to control issuance of our currency. Inflation and deflation rearranged our financial and industrial landscape during the course of the twentieth century, and inflation has actually become a monetary policy "necessity" – necessary to sustain "growth" and "prosperity."

The banks and corporations that have grow up around our banker credit monetary establishment have deprived the people of their farms, businesses, homes, and productive industries, in favor of the "factory farm," Wal-Mart Super Centers, and foreign production. We have come to depend on global mega corporations to satisfy our every "consumer" need – effectively, and increasingly, rendering "We the People" homeless on the continent our forefathers occupied!

We have allowed our rulers to load us with perpetual debt. We have meekly chosen profusion and servitude rather than economy and liberty. We are taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and our comforts, in our labors and amusements, and our callings and creeds. Those lucky enough to have decent jobs, labor eight or ten hours of the day and pay half of it to government to pay its debts, binding our children and grandchildren to pay the rest, so we can continue to enjoy the wasteful profusion we have come to believe is our right.

We are no longer able to call the mis-managers to account – government has become an overarching and unassailable Goliath. We can only urge our so-called representatives to pass more "programs" requiring more appropriations, and incur even more debt, in order to make our lives more secure and comfortable. And we continue to feel lucky to be able to hire ourselves out to rivet chains and shackles on the necks and ankles of ourselves and our fellow sufferers – believing, still, that we've never had it so good.

There is no cure now. Too many bridges have been burned. Too much capital is riding on perpetual expansion of the status quo. Yet all hope of sustainability has long ago been purged from the system. Only a catastrophic economic collapse can intervene – but not in time to put us on the right track. The tracks have already been ripped up and sold.

All hope for the future seems lost. Whatever happens, all solutions will be corporate mega-solutions for the mega-problems created by mega-corporations out to make a seamless and profitable New World Order.

When the system crashes, it would be nice to have some sort of safety net. But there is none. National, regional, and local self-reliance capability has been almost totally lost. When the stock market crashed in 1929, we still had a great and strong agrarian sector. A third of the population still lived on the land on relatively self reliant family farms. Most were very productive. Many were little more than "subsistence" farms, of course. But even the subsistence farms were capable of feeding extended families when the Great Depression began to take its toll.

Ample food was abundantly produced by the nation's farmers during the depression, though many farmers had lost their farms. The problem of low farm prices was said to have been due to "overproduction." Government to the rescue, of course. Government programs destroyed crops and livestock in a misbegotten attempt to "save the farmers" and force prices upward. This, during a period when many families in the cities were going hungry for lack of income.

The problem wasn't a lack of food production, or even overproduction of food. It was a great lack of liquidity in the economy. Jobs had been lost. People had no money.

When President Roosevelt declared a national emergency and began the New Deal, he neglected to utilize the most powerful attribute of government – that of money creation. He left that in the hands of the bankers, and the bankers chose to be very "conservative" in that regard. They saw no profit in loaning money to distressed people and failing businesses.

The New Deal required a lot of money to kick-start the economy, or "prime the pump," as Roosevelt put it. The bankers would gladly loan the government all the money required for the New Deal programs, because there was no risk involved, and much profit to be made. Of course, we're not talking of the small bankers, many of which had crashed along with the rest of the economy. We are speaking of the big bankers, and the "Money Power" itself – the Federal Reserve System occupying the seat of honor.

Since, at that time, Roosevelt and our Congress still had qualms about deficit spending and indebting the people, there were limits to the amount of money they would allow themselves to borrow, on behalf of the people, to prime the pump. What they did borrow wasn't nearly enough, and the New Deal failed to get the economy perking again. A lot of nice public work projects were accomplished, but they didn't help the small farmer or businessman very much at all. Industry continued to falter because of a lack of liquidity and purchasing power at the street and ground level.

Yet Roosevelt had the solution at his disposal all the while. Rather than borrowing all that money at interest from the bankers, he and the Congress could have simply issued enough Greenbacks to get the job done. The Greenback was still very much in the monetary mix at that time, and they were available to the administration for use. If he had used them, the Depression could have been nipped in the bud, and at the same time avoided adding billions to the national debt.

There is probably good reason why Roosevelt didn't resort to the issue of enough Greenbacks to properly prime the national economic pump. Lincoln, who created the Greenback to help pay the high running expenses of the Civil War, had been assassinated. There's no definitive proof that bankers had a hand in Lincoln's assassination, but there's both motive and plenty circumstantial evidence to make such a case. Perhaps Roosevelt didn't want to take that risk.

Perhaps the Greenback could save us today. But none of the presidential candidates have the guts to mention such a thing. Ron Paul wants to do away with our funny money system and proposes that we return to a gold and silver monetary system. Just how he would propose to do it is a little unclear. But speaking in terms of purely fiat money, the Greenback is head and shoulders better than Federal Reserve fiat "debt" money.

John Q. Pridger

WHAT PRIDGER'S CRUSADE IS ALL ABOUT